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Monday, 29 February 2016

Disarming Appeasers

Alphen, Netherlands. 29 February.
Last Saturday was ‘déjà vu all over again’. Indeed, I was cast in a trice back
to my 1970s youth as London saw the largest gathering of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND) since the 1980s. The “Stop Trident” rally attracted the usual
array of colourful political characters from the loony increasingly green left present
in strength to ‘raise awareness’ of a whole raft of nuclear-related (and
not-so-related) issues, to the considered, knowledgeable and principled activists
who have always populated Britain’s anti-nuclear weapons movement. Saturday’s principle
aim was to stop the British Government committing to a so-called ‘Main Gate’
decision to replace Britain’s four Vanguard-class nuclear-powered ballistic missiles
submarines with four more by the late 2020s via the so-called ‘Successor’ programme. In fact, the rally was about so much more…

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not
one of those commentators who dismiss such events or the people who attend them
as a bunch of ‘disarming’ naïfs. By dint of its very secrecy the British
nuclear establishment is far too comfortable in its self-reinforcing ‘certainties’. Indeed, as someone who has studied both
nuclear deterrence theory and strategy in depth (excuse the pun) and written
about it, there are serious questions to be answered by London as to the cost, utility,
and long-term viability of four state-of-the-art nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

As with most British ‘big ticket’
defence projects cost is spiralling out of control with over £40 billion of
public money likely to be spent on ‘Successor’. Moreover, my November 2015
evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee (HCDC) demonstrated to
effect that the 2010 decision to move the cost of paying for the nuclear deterrent
within an already over-stretched defence budget left Britain with the strategic
Hobson’s choice it faces today. On current levels of defence investment Britain
can either afford a strategic nuclear deterrent, or a global reach conventional
expeditionary force. It cannot afford both. Indeed, Britain’s continually-at-sea-deterrent
(CASD) is already vulnerable due to the lunatic 2010 decision to cut up brand
new maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), a gap will only be plugged in the early
2020s with the purchase of eight Boeing P8 MPA at great cost.

Furthermore, concerns about the
credibility of the Successor system over the fifty years of its planned in-service
life are both real and reasonable. This week a report will be presented to HCDC
by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) that will suggest advances
in drone technology, in particular so-called ‘gliders’, could render Britain’s
future submarine fleet vulnerable to detection and attack. The threat to the
force is more than the ‘old science fiction’ ascribed to this threat by one
commentator.

However, few if any of these
arguments of strategy and capability seemed to resonate at the CND rally. Even
less so with grand attendees Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and leader of the
Scottish Nationalist Party Nicola Sturgeon. However, it was Lianne Woods, leader
of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists, who really gave the game away. For her the
‘Stop Trident’ rally was merely a political metaphor and should really have
been entitled; “Stop the world we want to get off”.

In a spectacular misunderstanding
of history Woods claimed that the Cold War had been a narrow self-interested
fight between the US and the USSR, and suggested that Britain should never have
had any part of it. In fact, the Americans were persuaded by the Western Europeans
with Britain to the fore, to return in strength to Europe in the late 1940s to
defend a broken and broke Europe from over 300 of Stalin’s Soviet divisions which
were sitting just across the River Elbe on the then inner-German border. Read
my Oxford book on the subject!

Worse, to suggest some level of
moral equivalency between the United States and the Soviet Union insults not
just the Americans, but my own intelligence. It also insults the millions of
American servicemen and women who defended Europe from Soviet aggression and
writes off the huge investment the Americans continue to make in the defence of
Europe today. It is a commitment made all the more remarkable by the
unwillingness of Europeans to pay for their own defence. Woods reinforced her strategic
illiteracy by suggesting that Britain’s nuclear weapons did nothing to deter
terrorists. Derr!

And herein lies the ultimate
irony of Saturday’s CND rally. The refusal of Europeans to make a reasoned link
between the strategic dangers Europeans face from other states and conventional
defence investment INCREASES the importance of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons
exist to force the cost of any state aggression over a threshold that is so
unacceptable that said aggression is deterred. In the absence of sufficient
investment in conventional defences the threshold for the use of nuclear
weapons actually falls. In the dangerous world of today there is every reason
to believe that nuclear deterrence will continue to function for Europeans as an
alternative to conventional defence investment. A Europe that cannot defend
itself nor deter threats is appeasing reality.

Which brings me to the real point
of Corbyn, Sturgeon, Woods and their like; to disarm completely and remove
Britain a top five world military power from the collective defence of Europe.
Scrap Trident and ‘Successor’ and CND and their supporters will soon call for
the scrapping of NATO. This must be music to the Kremlin’s ears. Indeed, it is
the late 1970s and the Euromissile saga all over again. And, like the late
1970s I have no doubt Moscow, which is increasing its European nuclear strike
forces, is doing all it can to encourage such well-meaning, but utterly
strategically-misguided dissent.

Unilateral nuclear disarmament is
appeasement – pure and simple. Saturday’s rally was not about Trident,
Successor, or even British unilateral nuclear disarmament. It was pure
strategic denial. The only way to rid the world of ‘nukes’ is multilateral disarmament.
Any other approach makes the world less, not more safe.

For the sake of peace in freedom these
disarming appeasers must be resisted.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.